Supressionism
by Bob Waite
Margaret Grandinetti’s life changed abruptly when her fiancé Larry died. They were together two years, but as Margaret says, “Its not the quantity of time, it the quality.” This sad episode in her life at the close of 2009 triggered something. “I began to grieve harder and longer than I should. I know what grieving is because I’ve been in the health care field for the last 37 years. I felt like I was walking in hollow skin.”
About six months after Larry’s death, Margaret began to paint. The painting kind of took over. “I started painting and I would paint uncontrollably and I would paint for long periods of time. “In a very short time Margaret finished over 300 paintings, most done within the first six months of 2010, although she continued to paint into 2015.
Margaret always loved art. The thing is, she never before this frantic output ever put a brush to cloth or canvas. “Sure,” she says, “I loved art as a child. I always loved art class but I was terrible. I wasn’t any good in comparison to other students.” She does remember a time when she would visit a friend in Key West and draw with colored pencils. “It’s the one place the sky and the water come together. It’s like heaven and earth are intertwined. I had free time and I would just draw with color pencils. That was the very first time I got creative.”
Being hollow was something that Margaret thought about often. She would also use the word “empty” as a synonym for the same way she felt most of her adult life. On the surface everything was ok. Margaret says she, “charged through life.” The business she has with her daughter Jennifer McCandless took up much of her time. Together they own and manage homecare agency, the Country Homesteads and a group of small residential care homes for the elderly. (Currently they are opening an adult daycare center in Ottsville.)
On the outside, Margaret was happy. She maintained a positive outlook, but inside she felt hollow, numb. Painting changed that. Emotions and memories she had pushed way down into her soul emerged and she began to heal, not just from Larry’s passing but also from an unhappy history of childhood abandonment and conflicted emotions. “Painting became my voice; that’s how I was communicating.”
Art has always been interesting to Margaret. She was especially attracted to the work of Picasso. She fell in love with his art. She didn’t know why Picasso resonated so much with her soul. It is only after she began to understand her own work that she understood her fascination with Picasso. “He was able to express himself so freely throughout his entire life.”
A quote in one of her hundreds of Picasso books helped her unlock the mystery of what was going on in her own work. “What is in the mind of the artist is what matters in art.”
She believed this because her soul was being filled as she painted these female faces. Her choices of media would change and sometimes be mixed, but the faces were always there. When someone who viewed her work asked her if those faces were her face, she said, “No!” She reflects, “I was actually insulted. I really didn’t know how to paint but the interesting thing was that while I was painting I was reliving my past, because I did have emotional issues throughout my life, but I suppressed them.” Later Margaret learns that the paintings are all about her. But her art revealed itself at first by its effects.
While painting Margaret became very emotional. Emotions were released she did not even know she had. “I kept charging forward, being a single parent, raising my children, trying to be a upstanding citizen, I never before put my emotions out there.”
Margaret exhibited some of her work at the Larry Holmes Ringside Lodge in Easton. She noticed that she couldn’t part with the paintings, “I felt a lot of people were experiencing what these paintings portrayed, which is sadness, turmoil, sorrow, but I wouldn’t sell them.” She says, “People wanted to buy them but I just couldn’t do it. At that time I didn’t know how emotionally attached I was to them, but I kept them.”
Margaret had no idea what she was painting at the time. These paintings, which were about her, were also enigmas to her. She says, “They were all of me and about me, but I didn’t know it at the time. As she painted she felt “lost and out of control.” It took a while before she was able to articulate what all this was about.
In 2015 Margaret exhibited a painting at Tinicum Arts Festival. She entered Touched by a Goose, a mixed media painting. “To my surprise,” she says, it took Best of Show. The judges said of the painting, “We were deeply excited about this work. It has an incredibly rich, dynamic and evocative presentation. As a visual narrative, the figure seems immersed in an alternative world where a goose pervades her awareness.”
The painting was sold to a discerning collector who sits on the Philadelphia Museum of Art Board of Directors. Selling a painting was hard. Margaret says, “It was bittersweet, because although I was happy the gentleman purchased my painting, I also felt like I sold a part of my soul. It was this feeling that led to the discovery of what occurred while I was producing such a large number of paintings.”
What Margaret discovered by living her life on a fast track, raising children as a single mother, running her own business and “doing everything that was expected of me,” that she focused on performance and never took the time to feel real emotion. Her childhood was painful and involved deep abandonment and loss. Layer after layer of emotion was suppressed, and painting brought them all to the surface.
Margaret’s discovery about her art, she has named “Suppressionism.” This is a new genre of art that she has introduced in 2015. It gets its name from the concept of suppression in psychology, which is the art of stopping yourself from feeling something.
“It is,” Margaret notes, “ineffective because even if you hold back or suppress an emotion like anger, that feeling returns with a vengeance.”
Margaret defines suppression in art as a deep-rooted emotion in the conscious or unconscious mind that is released uncontrollably in art. This is what happened, and it happened without any conscious intent. It was triggered by the traumatic death of her fiancé and subsequently being driven to paint.
Margaret now describes her art as liberating, freeing, healing. What she couldn’t communicate verbally, she was able to do through the artistic medium of paint. Her choices of paint varied from acrylic to oil and watercolor. Many of her paintings are multi-media done on canvas and cloth.
The story of her abandonment and other things she discovered through her art will appear soon in a book she is writing that is inspired by Pablo Picasso.
So, Margaret Grandinetti, living and working with her daughter Jennifer McCandless in their beautiful Bucks County farmhouse in Kintnersville, is really a happy, positive person, but now there is also a depth to her that she and others never experienced. Her life is three-dimensional. Sadness and loss are allowed to surface as friends that teach her things about living. She has learned the great lesson that the Oracle of Delphi once taught Socrates, “Know Thyself.”
Bob Waite is the editor of Bucks County Magazine.